Read, Learn, Empower Event Results
ABC Reading Eggs' Read, Learn, Empower Event Results in 3500 Hours of Learning Conducted by 485 Children supported by The Smith Family
In the third term of the disruptive 2020 school year, ABC Reading Eggs hosted a Read, Learn, Empower event in support of The Smith Family, with a goal to help Australian children from disadvantaged backgrounds with their education.
Our aim was to raise money for The Smith Family to help support their life‑changing programs like The Smith Family's Learning for Life. This program helps more than 56,000 young Australians from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed at school and create better futures for themselves.
Additionally, we set a goal to give free access to the ABC Reading Eggs program so that young Australians could benefit from our award‑winning learning platform at home.
This leads to a new and exciting update: from the subscriptions donated, we have seen a massive amount of usage by these children, signalling the amazing impact our campaign has had over past months.
Across all the programs in ABC Reading Eggs, there have been over 3,500 hours of learning done by 485 students coming from 286 families!
Reading and maths skills form the foundations of our children's education. Without a solid foundation, it's almost impossible for them to thrive. This leads to children from disadvantaged backgrounds being well behind their peers by age four. By age six, some of these children are seven times more likely to be struggling at school (Growing up in Australia, Longitudinal Study of Australian Children).
Studies have shown that children who have exposure to reading earlier in life enter the school system better equipped to express themselves (Reading to Young Children: A HeadStart in Life). They can share their ideas with larger vocabularies and stronger comprehension skills. The issue is, many young children lack the resources to read at home, with limited access to books and reading material, meaning they miss out. The effects of this are devastating. Our program helps to solve this by providing the materials and support they need.
The students who received free access ranged from toddlers using the ABC Reading Eggs Junior program, which builds alphabet knowledge and ready‑to‑read skills, to school starters using Fast Phonics which helps kids to form words and learn the connection between letters and sounds.
Older kids also took advantage of the ABC Reading Eggspress program which helps children to build comprehension skills, shifting the focus from learning to read to reading to learn. And, of course, we had the bulk of our students using the flagship ABC Reading Eggs program to help them catch up with structured, one on one lessons that teach phonics, sight words and reading skills.
We're delighted by the result and would love to thank everyone who helped make this a reality. The learning will continue through the platform but we want to congratulate the students for putting in the hard work and making the most of this opportunity.